Science

“Each edition of the paper contained dozens of these announcements, every one more mundane and unimportant than the last. It seemed to me that these were nothing more than Facebook updates. The only purpose they served was to keep a community of people — in this case whoever had access to the newspaper — updated about what was going on in someone else’s life. We often talk about social media as some sort of new invention of the technological age, but here was the evidence that it has existed for much longer.”

“The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.”

“Because the galaxy is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, it is a much bigger target in the sky than the myriad galaxies Hubble routinely photographs that are billions of light-years away. This means that the Hubble survey is assembled together into a mosaic image using 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings.”

“The panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. Images were obtained from viewing the galaxy in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble. This cropped view shows a 48,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy in its natural visible-light color, as photographed with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in red and blue filters.”

So, the image above isn’t even all of it 😀 See the full article here, and see the video below for a fly-through of the panorama.

Katsushika Hokusai, Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall. Catzilla attacks. From 36 views of Mount Fuji, no 11

And, finally, over at FatCatArt, Zarathustra the Cat gets inserted into well known art pieces.

“Indeed, it is not very trustworthy that humans are gazing just at birds, they are not cats to be entertained by flying creatures! But humans love to watch cats doing most weird things endlessly.

In case you have aspirations to take over the world or have other nefarious plans, here’s some pointers.

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear Plexiglas visors, not face concealing ones.

32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

58. If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.

76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

For more tips on how to be a successful Evil Overlord, check out the full list.

If, however, you’d rather be a successful Vampire, these tips might be more up your sleeve.

3. The Hero will come armed with holy water, a cross and a stake. I will come armed with a 5.56 mm assault rifle and grenades. If the Hero has to cross open ground, there is no better way to reach out and touch someone than with a sniper rifle.

25. I will get a voice coach and change my name. “Hi, I’m Bob,” is less suspicious than “I…….am……Dra. ….cu…..la.”

54. I will not send bodies or parts thereof of former friends, relatives, mentors or lovers to the Hero in order to demonstrate my complete mastery over life and death.

To check your real life smarts, spend some time on You Are Not So Smart. To let the writer talk for a minute:

The central theme of You Are Not So Smart is that you are unaware of how unaware you are. There is branch of psychology and an old-but-growing body of research with findings that suggest you have little idea why you act or think the way you do. Despite this, you continue to create narratives to explain your own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and these narratives – no matter how inaccurate – become the story of your life.

You seem to be able to see other people deluding themselves all the time – your friends, your family, celebrities, politicians. The mental pratfalls of others seem so obvious, but you have a hard time seeing those shortcomings in yourself. You Are Not So Smart is a fun exploration of the ways you and everyone else tends to develop undeserved confidence in human perception, motivation, and behavior.

They’ve been doing podcasts lately, so those are on the first page, but do click through to older posts, there’s a lot of textey goodness too.

The first of the February books was Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. I have read LeGuin before, but that was mostly the fantasy side of her (Earthsea series) although I do recall having read a book with short story sci-fi stuff too. Reading the back blurb I was immediately intrigued.

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

I learned, from the Book Club Blog, that this book is part of the Hainish Cycle, a number of books LeGuin wrote featuring the same worlds. The different books are, as I read it, focusing on different planets and people and stuff, but the link between them is the world of Hain. They are also named in this book, but very much in the background. Wikipedia tells me that this book, in-book chronologically speaking, is the first (although not the first in publishing order), so it’s a nice introduction. I will definitely be reading more books in this series.

Review

The book starts when Shevek starts his journey from Anarres to Urras. From that moment on, the book alternates chapters taking place in the present with Shevek on Urras with chapters detailing Shevek’s past and how he came to be where he is now, and who he is now. I tend to find this switching annoying, however in this book I really liked it. The alternating chapters gave each other a deeper meaning by providing a backstory to what is happening to Shevek in the present as he recalls certain times or events.

Shevek comes from the world Anarres, which is the moon of the planet Urras. The Anarresti left Urras about 200 years ago after an uprising against the economic and socio-political structure of the world at that time (patriarchal, capitalist). Founded as a world of anarchists, where there are no laws, everyone is equal and the guiding principle is to do what is best for all. After 200 years though, anarchism has evolved into a form of communism, where any form of ‘egoising’ is admonished. Personal property, for example, is virtually non-existant, and instead of saying ‘my book’ they would say ‘the book that I am using’. Shevek, and a small group of friends he collects through the years, begin to realise that the idealised anarcho-communism of their world is, in places, turning into an oligarchy, where the work placement committee is deciding what is best for the planet, and they don’t like to be defied. So, instead of posting people where they are best skilled for, dissidents get far out postings where they can be kept ‘harmless’.

Shevek, as a brilliant physicist who far surpasses any other scientist on Anarres, gets restless. After being exposed to Urrasti scientific ideas, he starts communicating with the homeplanet, and eventually realises he must go there. As the first Anarresti to leave the planet since his people came, he is both applauded (by his friends) and greatly reviled for doing this.

While growing up, Anarresti children learn that Urras is an immoral place, with an extravagant lifestyle and strict capitalism. When Shevek arrives, he is ushered to the University that invited him, shown to his fancy room, and introduced to the scientists he’s been corresponding with.

For a while everything is well, but then Shevek grows restless. Everything he’s being shown is so very nice. Everyone is cordial, he gets shown around all the pretty things. However, he never gets to see the people outside the University without supervision. And as he starts to realise this, he also realises he is being used. And instead of the universal theory he is developing benefitting everyone, they want to use it for themselves, to make a profit and to keep the other nations (and worlds) under control.

Shevek manages to escape from the University, and as he meets and interacts with the middle and lower classes he learns of their problems, and becomes, almost by accident, a frontman for their resistance and the core of people that want to follow the ideals of Odo, the founder of the Anarres way of life.

After a bloody rebellion, he learns there is no way that he can bring the change he wanted to these people, and he finds a safe haven in the Terran Embassy. As they prepare to bring him home, a Hainish crewman on the ship decides to go down to the planet with Shevek. To meet his people and learn of his world.

The book is, in terms of sci-fi, a softer version. Especially in the chapters taking place on Anarres, where the technology level is much lower in daily life due to scarcity of many resources. I liked how the sci-fi nature of the world building was subdued, it really let the intellectual exploration of all these different ideas (socio-economic systems, political systems, higher physics) come to the forefront. I found it to be a great book that really got me thinking. I’d been taught these systems in school, however, this was pretty rudimentary and dealt more with how these systems should be, ideally. I enjoyed the exploration on how these societies could develop and how the system would evolve.

Bottom Line

I LOVED this book! This is the type of book that I enjoy greatly, especially in sci-fi and fantasy settings, where a culture that is (mostly) alien to us (being your everyday reader) gets an in-depth exploration. Other examples of this are Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (of which I, regretfully, have so far only read the first book: Hominids) and Ken Macleod’s Learning the World.